What Makes A Hospitality CRM?

The financial and operational benefits of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system are immense for any type of business. 

Though CRMs also come in all shapes and sizes, and not all are suitable for the hospitality industry.

We had a look at the main differences between a generic CRM and a hospitality-tailored one.

Generic CRM vs. Hospitality CRM

Generic CRMs, such as HubSpot or Salesforce, are centred around sales. Their main core features are for example lead management, forecasting and task management. They therefore often fall into the B2B software category.

Hospitality-specific CRMs on the other hand put the customer in the focus, which makes them B2C. Their features are designed to better communicate with customers and create personalised experiences to drive long-term loyalty.

Main differences

Customer journey

The hospitality customer journey covers both online and offline interactions. This makes it much harder to track than a complete online journey an e-commerce business might have.

In order to map out the full journey operators rely on integrations to get access to more data points. Even though well-known CRM providers offer a whole range of different integrations, they are mostly not hospitality related.

Customer profiles

Customer profile management looks entirely different for B2B and B2C. 

B2B contact management can be quite complex with associated companies, stakeholders involved, deals attached, etc. None of which is needed in the hospitality context. 

What matters here is to build a single customer view. Such a 360° customer profile should include basic contact information but more importantly, store preferences and previous online and offline interactions.

Reporting & Analytics

Hospitality KPIs are quite unique compared to other industries. They are more focused on visit data and marketing ROI. For example, in-venue visits and retention rates but also table covers, loyalty or WiFi sign-ups. 

Contrary to generic CRMs, these can all be easily accessed in a hospitality-specific one and operators can use them to build their own reports. 

There might be the option to add them to generic ones, however, this will come with additional costs.

Marketing

Equipped with CRM insights marketers can create personalised and tailored campaigns that bring customers back.

So integrated email & SMS marketing is probably one of the most important CRM features for hospitality businesses. This also covers the option for setting up marketing automation. 

A CRM is meant to improve operational efficiency. The best time-saving marketing tools are without doubt templates and pre-build customer segments. However, they need to be relevant to the industry to be really effective.

For a quick overview, we’ve summarised the most distinctive differences in the table below:

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The Stampede CRM is designed specifically to meet the needs of hospitality operators and marketers. Reach out to get started and bring back more customers, more often.